[tor-talk] Funding Tor Development trough Referral/Affiliate Marketing

Kolja Weber weber at flokinet.is
Sun Jan 10 14:21:37 UTC 2016


The amount of people buy stuff online via torbrowser should be quite low
(besides at some some "silkroads") , any serious online shop like amazon
will block Tor or VPN, otherwise the fraud order rate is quite high.
At least the CC processor / paypal / whatever will block Tor.

> Dear all,
>
> i've been told of some VPN services that are funding themselves by
> "spoofing" the referral ID in their users traffic, for hundreds of
> different websites for which they made an agreement for Referral /
> Affiliate Marketing, when they earn a commission.
>
> I'm wondering if that couldn't be a very interesting model also for
> TorBrowser, whereby the TorBrowser would automatically inject a referral
> ID (in the HTTP header or URL parameters), whenever a user connect to a
> certain amount of sites when they can buy something, and whenever the
> user buy something, the Tor Project Inc. get back a commission a way of
> financing the organization.
>
> That kind of model could be implemented with a custom plug-in within the
> Tor Browser.
>
> I don't see any risks for the end-users because:
> * For the end-user there would be no difference, as he would buy anyway
> what he want to buy at the same price.
>
> * If the end-user is buying something, he's already giving up his
> identity details to the shopping site
>
> * The website of the shop (being Amazon or others) will anyhow be able
> to identify that the user is coming from Tor network by looking at the
> IP address, so there would be no private information disclosure.
>
> What i don't know, is how many persons buy stuff online by using the Tor
> Browser!?
>


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